Belief in the ka shaped tomb architecture directly. A false door, a carved panel resembling a doorway that opened onto no real passage, was built into private tombs as the point at which the ka could pass between its statue or burial place and the world of the living to receive offerings, whether real food brought by family and mortuary priests or, once that supply inevitably lapsed, the painted and relief-carved food depicted on the tomb walls and the offering formula recited or inscribed there, already living as its own entry on this religion's page as the practice Hetep Di Nesu. Wealthier tombs also included one or more ka statues, physical backups intended to house the ka permanently if the mummified body itself were ever destroyed, since the ka's survival, not the corpse's preservation alone, was what mattered.
The ba received different treatment because its defining feature was movement rather than residence. Coffins and papyri from the New Kingdom onward regularly show the ba as a small bird with a human head hovering near or above the mummy, and funerary literature such as the Book of the Dead includes specific spells, most notably Spell 89, aimed at securing the ba's reunion with the body each night, since a ba permanently separated from its corpse, or a corpse that decayed past recognition, threatened the whole afterlife project. The Pyramid Texts, centuries older still, already show royal funerary religion working through comparable anxieties for the king's own ka and ba, evidence that this composite picture of the self was not a late elaboration but close to the foundation of Egyptian funerary belief from its earliest textual attestation.